The Living Moment: Modernism in a Broken World

Chapter Three. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and The Sun Also Rises

Chapter Three Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and The Sun Also Rises . . . the lad in the Rue de Notre Dame des Champs At the carpenter’s loft on the left-hand side going down—­­ The lad with the supple look like a sleepy panther— . . . Veteran out of the wars before he was twenty: Famous at twenty-five: thirty a master— Whittled a style for his time from a walnut stick In a carpenter’s loft in a street of that April City. —Archibald MacLeish, “Years of the Dog” Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure . . . —Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway emerged slowly in contrast to F. Scott Fitzgerald, deliberately developing a special style with help from Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Hemingway knew that the nineteenth-century order was gone. The style he carefully evolved expressed a way to live in the world and if necessary to endure it, a style that, at its best, had the same quality Hemingway admired in the bullfighter Pedro Romero, “holding the purity of his line through the maximum of exposure.” It was a style aware of danger, despair, and death. The Hemingway moral hero, whether man or woman, uses a minimum of words, especially when under pressure. Associated with Hemingway’s style, one always senses pain and death. This style was the opposite of Fitzgerald’s lyrical expression of possibility. But amid the pain and chaos of experience the Hemingway hero finds relief, even a form of redemption, in the “good place.” In view of Hemingway ’s special admiration for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this 59 “good place” respite may recall Huck and Jim on their raft as they float idyllically along the Mississippi River. In Hemingway’s In Our Time, such good places recur in “Cross-Country Snow” and while fishing in the “Big Two-Hearted River.” In “Cross-Country Snow” Nick Adams and his friend George are skiing in the Swiss Alps: “The rush and the sudden swoop as he dropped down a steep undulation . . . plucked Nick’s mind out and left him only the wonderful flying, dropping sensation in his body [italics added].” The following exchange indicates that this experience means much more to Nick than to George. We already know that Nick has been wounded in the war: “Maybe we’ll never go skiing again, Nick,” George said. “We’ve got to,” said Nick. . . . “We’ll go, all right,” George said. “We’ve got to,” Nick agreed. One senses desperation in Nick’s “We’ve got to.” Later, in “Big Two-Hearted River,” Nick’s fishing provides such relief, but Nick refuses to fish further along the river in the swamp because fishing in the swamp would be “tragic.” Nick is a man on the edge and needs perfection as a kind of therapy.Toward the end of The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes finds recovery in fishing with Bill Gorton up in Burguete in Basque Country, a needed relief from the complexities and pain back in Pamplona. Fitzgerald had a spectacular and even mythic early success with This Side of Paradise in 1920, becoming the epitome of golden youth, genius, early success, and the Jazz Age, when everything was possible, and his style was unmistakably his own in that precocious novel, its characteristic rhythms expressing a sense of the potential beauty of life as realized in the iridescent moment, a beauty always threatened by time. Five years after This Side of Paradise he produced a masterpiece with The Great Gatsby. Hemingway’s emergence also possessed a mythic quality, that of the obscure avant-garde artist deliberately, slowly, and with great integrity fashioning a new way of writing. The style he evolved expressed a view of life that was entirely different from Fitzgerald’s. Hemingway fashioned a disciplined style, understated and factual and able to control powerful emotion when it threatened to become overwhelming. In Paris, he and his wife, Hadley, lived over a sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs off the Boulevard du Montparnasse, and this with his early obscurity and apparent poverty suggested artistic integrity. His publications then were almost private events, clearly experimental ventures. First came Three 60 The Living Moment Stories and Ten Poems, brought out by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Publishing Company in Paris in July 1923; it was fifty-eight pages, and they distributed 300 copies. Two of...